Obama as we knew him... man and boy

Schoolfriends remember his love for comic books, basketball and teasing the girls. A former boss recalls him as a young man running a community project in Chicago. A fellow senator remembers being beaten by him at poker. Gifted student, quiet persuader, charismatic speaker, loyal friend... We speak to the people who knew Barack Obama best, revealing an intimate, often touching, portrait of a man on the brink of greatness

Barack Obama as a student at the school in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1990. Photograph: Joe Wrinn/AP

Indonesia 1969: Rully Dasaad

After Barack's parents split up, he moved with his mother and Indonesian stepfather to Jakarta, aged seven, where he befriended classmate Dasaad - now a commercial photographer - at Basuki Primary School.

When the teacher introduced 'Barry Soetoro' [Obama went by his stepfather's name at the time] to the class, he was very exotic. He was the only non-Indonesian; he was taller than all of us and chubby. He was accompanied by his white mum and his Indonesian stepfather, who was wearing a military outfit, and I remember thinking, that's strange, he looks half black, half white - maybe this is what a boy from Hawaii looks like. He wore Bermuda pants that extended below the knee, whereas our short pants were halfway down our thigh, and he wore T-shirts with stripes whereas ours were plain. He was the only left-handed student in class - it's not considered polite in Indonesia to be left-handed - so it was always amazing to see him writing with his left hand.

Barry was the only one in the class who had bread in his lunch box - the rest of us had traditional Indonesian snacks. There's one called kepan - sticky rice and desiccated coconut which you have to dip in this very strong chilli sauce. It's hot even for us. But Barry was very curious. He tried it and burnt his mouth, and he was saying: 'It's hot, it's hot.' You can see he was always open to learning something new.

He and his mum had been living in Indonesia since 1967. She worked for USAID, helping Indonesian women in the countryside to live in a more Western fashion. For the first two months, Barry was still adjusting. We had a singing class once a week and he wouldn't sing, probably because he was shy and worried that he might sing a word wrong. But after three months, he spoke Indonesian. He became one of us.

I remember one time he had a birthday and I went to his house with some classmates. Barry's house was down a mud track; to play football there, you had to put plastic bags on your feet. Near his house was a small canal - at that time it wasn't polluted - and they had small salamanders in it. Barry had chickens in his home field. It was totally normal for Jakarta in those days.

Me, Barry and Yanto used to play together every lunch break for two years and he was very loyal to our gang. If I said: 'Don't play with that boy, play with us', he'd do it. We'd try to finish our lunch as fast as we could and then we'd go to the fields and play: running, hide and seek, marbles and tak gebok, an Indonesian game of tag where you try to hit your fellow boys with a ball. One time, there was a naughty young boy who missed Barry with the ball so he took a small stone from the playing field and threw it and hit Barry's head, which started bleeding. I remember Barry just went quiet - his mum had taught him not to fight. He was one of those kids you could tell was brought up with a lot of love and affection and so he was never angry or nasty.

We loved playing so much we were always in on the third bell. Most of the girls had a problem with our gang because we were always very active and sweating, and sometimes we'd miss-throw and hit a girl. 'Oh, here they are again,' they'd say. 'Oh, you're sweating from the sun, you stink, go away.' So I had to teach Barry Indonesian swear words to say back to the girls.

At the time, my father and President Sukarno were the only people in the country with Cadillacs, and both were presents from my grandpa, who was the richest man in Indonesia. Grandpa bought me all the DC Comic books, and I was the only one who had them, so Barry and Yanto would borrow the books and copy pictures of Batman and Spider-Man out and ask me to judge which was better. Barry was always better than Yanto. Even Yanto always agreed with that. Barry had a great eye.

We came back from the summer vacation for fifth grade and Barry wasn't there. The teacher said he'd gone back to Hawaii. Our small gang was split up.

Somebody said in 2006: 'Look at Time magazine - your old friend is running for President.' I didn't recognise him. He was much slimmer. Then I saw a picture where he was laughing and I recognised him from the smile and the teeth.

Later on there were allegations that the school was a madrassa, and foreign journalists began hanging around. But the small mosque at the school today was added on in 2001. There was no mosque at the time and it wasn't even a particularly religious school.

It's very sad if a great nation like America wants to persecute Obama just because he was born from a Muslim dad and had a Muslim stepfather. I'm sure one of the reasons for the flexibility he has today is his experiences in Indonesia. At the school, there were half-Chinese and half-Dutch Indonesians, Javanese people, Ambonese, and there were Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Catholics. Barry is used to a mix.

Hawaii 1975: Tony Peterson

Barack moved back to Honolulu, Hawaii in 1971, aged 10, and lived with his grandparents. At Punahou High School, he met Peterson, who now works for the United Methodist Church in Tennessee.

There were only five black kids out of 1,600. I used to get to school early; I'd see Barry and he'd say: 'Let's go shoot some hoops' and we'd play pick-up basketball together. He was a bit chubby but far better than me. Rik, Barry and myself jockeyed around and talked casually, and realised that here we are, intelligent black men, and we could have some good conversations.

We'd sit on the sidestep of the library, where a radio would be playing Marvin Gaye and the Eagles, and have these great conversations about life. I recorded one for an English assignment. Rik asked what we thought 'time' was, and Barry replied: 'Time is just a collection of human experiences combined so that they make a long, flowing stream of thought.'

He was 14 then, Rik was 16, I was 17, and Barry was definitely matching us. We talked about the future. Rik said he'd be a doctor, which he is; I was going to be a lawyer, which I'm not; and Barry was going to be a basketball player. Barry wrote in my year book: 'Go on and get that law degree, and I'm going to be a famous basketball player, and when I need to sue my team I'll call you.' Of course he went on to be the lawyer and not a shabby one either.

We talked about race but not, I thought, out of a deep sense of pain. The revolutionary anger started to die down in the Seventies. We weren't dealing with the harsh barriers, more with the rate of change, the progress we were making. Black culture was popular across the race spectrum. Jesse Jackson was a big public figure, everyone loved Stevie Wonder, the most popular sports star was Julius 'Doctor J' Ervin, the basketball genius. So we were talking about things like: would the girls date us black guys and would we see a black President in our lifetime? The answer to the first was yes and on the second our take was: there'll be progress, but we won't see it happen.

Decades later, I was in a bookstore in Boulder, Colorado, visiting my brother Keith and he picks this book Dreams From My Father out of the remainder bin and said: 'Look who wrote this.' It was Barry's memoir. Where he talks about his Punahou years, I was surprised by the agony he was feeling. But I'd been black all my life in a way that Barry sort of hadn't. People looked at him and saw a black man, but his own identity was that he was raised by and living with his white mother and these white grandparents. And maybe because of his white half, white people were willing to let their racist side out in front of him. So he had a lot to wrestle with, especially as a teenager. He was questioning things and following them towards agony and resolution.

In 2004 (at the Democratic convention), I told all my friends that an old friend of mine was making the speech. I've voted both sides before, but I have never heard a political speech so profound. What he was saying is what I believe - that's the America I want to live in. I'm extremely proud of him and I trust him. I know the man. I trust his intellect. I trust his judgment.

One of my favourite lines from that speech was something we used to talk about on the library step: 'We need to eradicate the slander that says a black kid with a book is acting white.' That was the kind of stuff we'd experienced; I had lived a lifetime of trying to do well academically and having black kids say: 'You're acting white.'

Punahou was a good school - my family had to save every penny to send me there, Obama scraped in on a scholarship. It was originally a school to educate missionaries' children and it still had that missionary spirit. One of the things that Punahou instilled in us is that you're given much in order to give much - you're here to go out and help the world.

Los Angeles 1980: Margot Mifflin

University friend of Obama at Occidental College, LA. Now a journalism professor.

I was a year ahead of him. I invited him and his roommate Hasan Chandoo, who I started dating, to dinner, and they showed up looking crisp and fresh-faced. I'd go to student parties round their house; I remember dancing to 'Once in a Lifetime' by Talking Heads in a sea of people.

Barry was a focused, dedicated student and an earnest, sincere person, but he wasn't too serious to talk about the fun stuff. We'd hang out and talk about what was happening in class and who was dating whom. He goofed around with the rest of us. He was engaging and perhaps even charismatic, but I wasn't aware of him being a playboy. He was friends with women who were impressive feminists as well as people who were more socially focused. He straddled groups: the arts/literary crowd, which tended to stick together, and the political activist crowd, likewise. He belonged to both.

I studied in a creative writing class with him. I remember him submitting a poem called 'Pop' (since published in the New Yorker). It was a penetrating portrait of his grandfather, in which his grandfather asked him what he was going to do with his life.

I was also at the rally where he gave his first speech, an anti-apartheid rally at Occidental. He was hunched over the mike, it was too low for him. He was nervous and he was rushing a little. I recall him saying something like: 'Occidental should spend less time investing in South Africa and more time on multicultural education.' That was impressive because you think of multiculturalism as a Nineties phenomenon, and here he was in the early Eighties, thinking about the need for that in an educational sense.

It didn't occur to anyone this guy could become President. He certainly didn't go around saying anything that audacious or ambitious. He was a nose-to-the-grindstone, quiet worker, not the kind who would run around tooting his own horn, even though he was probably getting messages from his professors that he had serious talent. I think he was figuring out who he would be and when he left Occidental he took the steps to become that person. It's like Shakespeare's line: 'Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.' He was the guy who achieved greatness and it clearly took a lot of hard work to do that.

Chicago 1980s: Auma Obama

Obama's Kenyan half-sister, who first met Barack in the Eighties. Worked in children's services in Reading, UK but has since moved to Nairobi.

We used to see photos of Barack as he was growing up in America. My father always talked about him, that Barack would come home to Kenya some day.

He would say to us: 'You've got to write to your brother Barry' and obviously as a child you think: 'Oh yeah, OK, all right', but you're not really that fussed, so I didn't make any contact.

It was actually Barack who contacted me first, after the death of our father. I was in Germany, studying in Heidelberg, and he wrote to me. He has the same name and handwriting as our father so when I looked at the back of the letter I had this shiver go up my spine. We corresponded for a while and then I went over to the US to see a friend. It was the mid-Eighties. I had decided to visit Barack as his guest in Chicago.

I was nervous. I was very close to my dad and Barack was a piece of him that I hadn't known. What if we did not get along? Well, I wasn't disappointed. We just got into the car, his little car, and started talking and never stopped. It was a very intense 10 days together.

Barack was a community organiser. He was just a small person, a nobody, but he had the same intensity he has today. He was disturbed by the status quo and was working at the grassroots to see what was going wrong. I was very active in political awareness work in Germany and I saw that he had the same energy and passion to make a difference and to change people's lives.

For me it was: 'Wow, this is like Christmas', where you get this huge, big present of somebody who actually understands what you are saying, where you're coming from.

Later, I moved back home for a year to work as a tutorial fellow at the University in Nairobi. Barack visited Kenya for the first time. I picked him up in my Beetle. He did not have any of these hang-ups, you know: 'Oh there are mosquitoes.' He came and just was. It made it so easy. We spent a lot of time discussing and explaining things.

I don't know if it was strange for Barack to come here. The thing is it wasn't strange for the family. Nobody but me had met Barry but everybody knew him from our father. We don't dramatise family in Kenya and people weren't fazed by him at all, although they did find some things interesting. For my grandmother, it was his accent and the fact that he could not speak Luo.

And all the kids would come and compare their skin colour to Barack's. People had many questions for him and Barack definitely had many questions for them. There was never a moment of silence or embarrassed awkwardness.

It wasn't all nice. Sometimes, he wanted to see relatives I didn't really get along with and he'd be like: 'It's my right and I need to see them and I'm not going alone and you're coming with me'.

To take a break, we went to the coast. Coming back (from Mombasa to Nairobi) we travelled by bus. The driver was going so fast and I was so, so scared. Barack took it all in his stride. I, the Kenyan who should have been used to it, was furious at the driver. But Barack was just like: 'OK, this is the adventure that it is.' He came with this big baggage of tolerance and relaxedness and the ability to just absorb.

When I went to his wedding [in the US, in 1992] I could see that people were very impressed with him. People listened to him. I could see that a lot of them were people of prominence and thinkers in the community.

Today, I still see the same Barack I first met. At home, he's the same, very normal person.

Politically, he's now a big shot, but there's an expression that says a big shot is a small shot who never stopped shooting. He was shooting back then - not in the sense the Republicans would use it, with a rifle - but in that he was always working, and people came on board and slowly more and more people understood that what this guy is trying to do is going to make a difference to America and the American people.

Sometimes, I'm awed by what he has achieved. I'm very, very proud of him. I have to keep reminding myself: 'Oh he's just my little brother' just to bring it back to reality and make sure that I don't get too excited about who I am because of what he's done.

Chicago 1985: Gerald Kellman

Employed Obama as a community organiser at the Calumet Community Religious Conference, Chicago, 1985-88.

I met Barack at a coffee shop on Lexington Avenue, New York. He was a year out of Columbia and he'd just quit a job working as a journalist for a business publication.

One of his preoccupations was being a novelist and he had taken the journalism job to facilitate that. He wrote a number of short stories about his experiences, other people's lives and their struggles. I read a couple and I thought they were pretty good. He's a wonderful writer by non-professional standards, but he knew he wasn't up with his heroes.

So he'd applied to work for my group as a community organiser in the impoverished South Side of Chicago. The Calumet region of Chicago was the largest producer of steel in the country. When the mills shut down, the jobs went, gangs and drugs became huge and the place unravelled.

Barack had grown up as an outsider, without a father, as an American kid living abroad and separated from his mother at high school. Outsiders do one of two things: try to be like everyone else or identify with other outsiders. Barack did the latter. He was reflective and willing to identify with people in poverty, with people who faced discrimination.

He was also idealistic. He had been inspired by Dr Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, but he was a decade or so too late for it and this was the closest he could get.

I was offering him $10,000 a year and two grand for a car and I remember thinking: someone who was smart enough to do it should have been smart enough not to do it. The salary was ridiculous, the status low, the prospects bad and he had to move to Chicago. The way I convinced him was to talk about the Calumetians' lives and he wanted to see what he could do to help them. Barack is often motivated by a desire to learn, and he was hungry for hands-on experience.

Chicago's South Side contains the largest black community in the States. Barack's job was to go into the community and interview individuals to find out what the problems were and then teach them the public skills to get change and that if they were to get anywhere the community needed to work together. Barack had to give people confidence and he did it brilliantly because he listened. He's a remarkably quick learner and not at all snobbish about whether he learns from people of high or low status.

In community organising, people often don't like each other. The less there is, the more people tend to grasp for it. One day, Barack noticed that the city had removed asbestos from the manager's office of the Altgeld housing estate, but not from the residents' flats. People were so incensed by the inequity that they were more than ready to organise. They drove down to Springfield to confront the politicians and it got that area of Chicago mobilised in a way they never had been before.

I think a lot of his orientation was formed in his time as an organiser. Local politicians and clergy felt our group was a potential threat and Barack had to decide when to compromise and when not to, when to be confrontational and when to be collaborative and those parts of his character were shaped during his organising career.

He was resilient and good at turning things around. Always, when things were going badly, Barack would stay up most of the night, trying to figure things out. And by the next day he'd be meeting people and we'd be trying an alternative strategy.

We socialised together. He would come over for dinner at our house and we played tennis together. He was neat for a young man. His afro had been cropped by that time and he would wear button-down, short-sleeve shirts, slacks and shoes. He couldn't afford to take his shirt to the laundry but it always looked neatly pressed. His apartment was also very neat, almost monastic, without much furniture and filled with books. He was very thin, skinnier than he is now. Women would regularly invite him home to dinner to try to fatten him up, but it didn't work.

Three years after he'd started work for us, we were walking around at a conference at the Harvard divinity school in Cambridge and he said he'd decided to leave organising for law school. He didn't see organising making the big differences that he felt were needed. He hadn't met Michelle yet, but he wanted a family and he didn't want the uncertainty of the low salary. I thought his reasons were good and that he'd done a great job.

He was open to learning about the church. As for his personal orientation towards God, he was working that out too. He was influenced by the kind of people he was meeting and the role that faith played in their lives. He was moving from an intellectual understanding to a more visceral and experiential understanding.

Jakarta 1980s: Julia Surakusuma

Ann was very proud of Barry. She was very close to her children and spoke very warmly about them. There aren't many mothers who could create their children in the way she created him.

I always resent the suggestion that she was not a good mother because Barry went back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents when he was 10. It was precisely because she was a good mother that she made that choice, to do what was best for him. It was a very painful decision for her but they contacted each other as frequently as possible.

Both Barry and his sister, Maya, are the living incarnation of what is best about their mother. Often, it's really painful for me to watch him on television because I can see his mother in him.

Ann was very smart and, in many ways, a pioneer. She was really brave, even revolutionary, to have married entirely outside her culture. She was a rebel in a way, but not confrontational. They are the same qualities you see in Barry. The fact that he wants to work for the community, that was his mum. The people's person side of him, that was his mum.

Ann and Barry have 'fire', but in the case of Ann, it was tempered by her earthy, motherly nature, whereas with Barry, he's more 'air' and expresses his passion more through his intellect. I met him two or three times when he came to visit his mum in Jakarta when he was in his early twenties. I remember him coming into the living room and sitting on the arm of the sofa. I remember so well his smile and his personality. He was charismatic even then.

Harvard 1989: Larry Tribe

University professor of constitutional law, who taught Obama, and for whom Obama worked as a research assistant.

Barack came to see me during his first year at Harvard. It was 31 March 1989. I found my desk calendar and I'd written his name with an exclamation point. From the late 1960s, when I began teaching as a professor at Harvard Law School, until the present, there has been no other student whose name I've noted in that way.

He impressed me from the beginning as an extraordinary young man. He was obviously brilliant, driven and interested in pursuing ideas with a clear sense that his reasons for being in law school were not to climb some corporate ladder, nor simply to broaden his opportunities, but to go back to the community.

He had a combination of intellectual acumen, open-mindedness, resistance to stereotypical thinking and conventional presuppositions. He also had a willingness to change his mind when new evidence appeared, confidence in his own moral compass and a maturity that obviously came from some combination of his upbringing and earlier experience.

I asked him to be my research assistant, a role he filled for a year and a half. We had a much more vibrant dialogue than one typically has with a research assistant. He was witty, he had a lighthearted touch and even though we were dealing with some pretty grave and weighty subjects, it was always a breezy thing to talk to him.

He had a charismatic quality and was very engaging. Other students gravitated towards him and liked him rather than envying him or wanting to compete with him.

Typically in a place as competitive as Harvard or Yale, one student will make a comment and another student will try and one-up him by saying something cleverer or wittier. But Barack would never put anyone else down. If a student expressed a view he didn't agree with, he nevertheless saw the value in it and built on it.

He found points of communality and gave people the sense that he could see where they were coming from, and what their core beliefs were, and why they were worthy of respect. It was really a precursor to the way he engages in dialogue across ideological and partisan divisions.

In his second year, he became the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review [one of the leading law journals in the world]. It was a position which represented the judgment of his peers about his intellectual acumen and his leadership capacities. He emerged with the enthusiastic backing of other students. In no sense was this some kind of affirmative action; he was chosen as the best person people could find.

We used to take long walks on the Charles River in Boston. Our conversations were enormously wide-ranging and enjoyable, about life in general, not just about work. I had no doubt as I got to know him that he had an unlimited future. I didn't have a clear sense of what direction it would take, but I thought it would be political and I thought the sky was the limit.

He had a personal quality which was transcendent and I continued to feel that way about him each time we met. And the quality he demonstrated that I've always been left with more than any other is authenticity. There isn't a fibre of phoniness about this guy.

Illinois 1996: Senator Terry Link

A friend of Obama since they played poker and golf together at the Capitol, Springfield, Illinois in the 1990s.

We came into the Illinois Senate together in 1996, were seat mates - we sat next to one another on the Senate floor - and office mates - our offices were adjacent. The Senate schedule had us in Springfield away from our families on Wednesday nights.

I don't drink at all, Barack would have a beer once in a while, so we didn't carouse the bars like lots of the others. You could say that we were both measured personalities. So I said: 'Why don't we have a card game?' We called it the 'Committee Meeting' but there was no shop talk allowed. We had seven or eight Republicans and Democrats and it was a time to get to know one another out of the shadows of the Capitol. We'd take the suits and ties off, sit back and have a night of relaxing. It was low-stakes poker: a dollar stake, three dollar top raise. No one was going to lose their mortgage or house. Barack wore sweat pants and a baseball cap, drank a beer and would cadge a few cigarettes.

If his style of poker is like how he'll run the White House I'll sleep well at night. He is very conscious of the odds. If he thought he had a chance of winning he'd stay in the game; if he thought not he'd fold straight away. He read and played the field very well. He was serious at it.

There was another player, Larry Walsh, a relatively conservative Democrat. Barack trumped his four of a kind with a higher four of a kind to take the pot and Walsh threw his cards down. 'Doggone it, Barack,' he said. 'If you were more liberal in your card playing and more conservative in your politics, we'd get along much better.'

Barack's golf game was terrible at first, that's probably the nicest way to say it. I'm an avid golfer. He hated losing to me. He's so competitive and his frustration got so bad that he went out and took lessons. His game improved a lot but I still beat him.

As Republicans controlled the House it was a monumental task to get legislation passed. Barack could forge relations with others very well. He was very even-keeled, even when bullied on the Senate floor. It frustrated him, but he always kept his cool. His demeanour was: 'I'm going to explain this, I'm not going to get into a fist fight about this.'

One of his biggest preoccupations was healthcare and he worked very hard with the Republicans to say: 'This is something advantageous to your party as well.' When we took a majority in 2002, he became chairman of public health, but he kept his relationships with the Republicans; the last thing he was going to do was say: 'I'm in charge and I forget you guys.' The old chairman of public health used to have meetings in City Hall, but Barack would take the meetings out and about to the people.

I saw his daughters being born and I know his wife Michelle very well. She is a very level-headed individual and she keeps Barack's feet on the ground.

London 2008: David Lammy

British MP and Minister of State for Higher Education; friend of Obama's since 2005.

I first met him at Harvard at an event for black alumni from all over the world. There was lots for us to talk about because we share similar heritage; my family are from Guyana, half his family are from Kenya, we're both black, we're both politicians in western democracies; but beyond law and politics there was lots of synergy.

What I found interesting about Obama is his reach beyond America. He has an acute understanding of developing countries.

He is someone who I find it very easy to get along with. He's incredibly charming and funny. He's clearly got an obsession with ties because whenever he meets me he talks about the ties that British people wear. I'll be wearing something with loud colours, and in America they are a bit more straightforward, and he makes light of that. He'll go: 'Look at my tie compared to yours!' - this coming from one of the coolest men in the world!

There have been moments where he's rung me up over the past few years, and he's been sincere and very calm. He's not someone that gets into a flap or displays any anxiousness, even though sometimes those conversations have been in the heat of anxious situations.

I met him this February when he had just come out of Super Tuesday. We were in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, very much rural America, and he gave a speech in the university. He went down really well but what struck me was that, despite his hectic schedule, backstage he wanted to thank every local official: he spent a good 20 minutes with all of them. He then started to walk me around, introducing me to them, and I was a bit 'I'm not really terribly important', but he was determined that they should meet the Minister for Skills in the UK.

When I saw him I felt he'd been emboldened and strengthened by his experiences. He always had charisma and a relaxed, personable style, but a few years later one can see his growth as a presidential candidate and a man.

We've got a professional friendship; we haven't been golfing together. I don't think he's got enough time for that, and actually neither have I. But his faith is very important to him, and that's something I have had some affinity with and that we reflect on. He has also lost both his parents, and he was very gracious when my mother died of ovarian cancer earlier this year; he had lost his mother to the same illness.

Like all inquisitive, curious and interesting politicians, he is someone who can scan the horizons of many different issues and can find politics in cultural situations - the sadness of death, the experience of living in a developing country and what that means, or economic hardship in rural middle America. He is someone who has a strong emotional intelligence as well as a strong cognitive intelligence.

The rise of Barack Obama

Early life and education

1961 Born 4 August in Honolulu, Hawaii to Barack Obama Sr, a Kenyan and Ann Dunham, a white American anthropologist. His parents separated when he was two. His father later returned to Kenya where he already had four children by his first wife including Auma Obama. After this, he saw Obama only once more in 1971 when he was 10.

1967 Moves with his mother and stepfather to Indonesia where he attends local schools in Jakarta. His half-sister, Maya, is born in 1970.

1971 Returns to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents, attending Punahou School.

1980 Studies at Occidental College in LA before moving to Columbia University two years later.

1985 Becomes director of Chicago church-based community organisation, Developing Communities Project (DCP) where he works for three years.

1988 Enrols at Harvard Law School. Becomes first black president of the Harvard Law Review

2004 Elected as Senator of Illinois becoming only the fifth African American senator in US history.

2008 Becomes the Democratic presidential candidate on 3 June after defeating Hillary Clinton in the primary campaign.

Family life

1992 Marries Michelle Robinson, whom he met in 1989 while working as an intern at a Chicago law firm. They have two daughters, Malia Ann, born 1998, and Natasha, born 2001. Ally Carnwath

· This article was amended on November 2 2008. We mistakenly said that Auma Obama, Barack Obama's half-sister, worked in children's services in Reading. She has left that position and now works in Nairobi. This has been corrected.